I am sincerely glad to be able to express myself in substantial
agreement with the majority of my critics, only asking them in turn to
recognise that this is but the first half of my subject--an outline of
civics as in the first place a matter of science, a geographic and
historic survey of past conditions, a corresponding census of present
ones--here discussed and insisted on as affording the needful base for
their demands upon civics as an art, that of effective social service.
In this respect various critics have in fact anticipated large elements
of this future portion of my paper, so that in general views, at least,
critics and writer are not so far apart as would appear were the
preceding pages submitted as a comprehensive outline of the subject,
instead of as its scientific introduction merely.
Of criticisms strictly applicable to this paper as it stands, there are
really very few. I am confident that the chairman must be quite alone in
too modestly applying to his great work that description of London
itself, with which the paper (Section A, pp. 104-107) opens, since his
volumes offer really our first effective clue to the labyrinth, and his
method of intensive and specialised regional survey, the intensest
searchlight yet brought to bear upon it.
Taking, however, a concrete point of criticism, such as that of the
monumental planning of modern Paris as derived from forest rides, the
critic need only walk through any French forest, or even to consult a
Baedeker, or other guide-book, with its maps of any historic dwelling
and its surroundings, from Chantilly or Fontainebleau to minor ones, to
see that this plan, originally devised for the pleasure, success and
safety [Page: 137] of the hunt, and later adapted to domination and
defence, became next appreciated as affording the finest possible
perspectives of the palatially rebuilt chateau. So that it is not at all
a fantastic hypothesis, but an obvious and inevitable conclusion that
Napoleon's and Haussman's plans were not at all invented by them for
Paris, but were directly imitated from the familiar landscape
architecture of the preceding century, which again was but the simplest
development from the spacious forest rides of older hunting nobles, laid
out without any thought of the architectural and city developments they
were destined in later centuries to determine.
The citizen of Washington had till lately often forgotten that the
magnificent perspectives of his city are due to the French
landscape-architect (Major L'Enfant) whom Washington imported for the
express purpose of laying out his capital; yet it is no less clear that
this most magnificent of the New World city plans is derived from Old
World forest rides, than that its monumental edifices descend from
Renaissance and classic exemplars.
I plead indeed for such studies of the plans of any and every city from
the point of view of its natural development. The too purely abstract
and subjective sociology of the dwellers of great cities like London
would in this way be helped by the facts of their own topographic
history, already well known and clearly explained by geographer and
historian, towards again feeling with the naturalist that even the
modern city is but the most complex evolutionary expression and
development of the life of Nature.
This view I take to be indeed a commonplace in France; but I account for
its apparent unfamiliarity to English readers from the fact of our
scanty forests in this island being left practically wild, our nobles
not inhabiting them, but the cultivated pasture and arable regions
below--planting trees indeed, "plantations," but seldom woods, and
practically never forests at all. This again brings out the fact that
the French nobles, despite our urban associations with regard to them
have belonged far more than ours to the social formation and tradition
of the hunter--while ours, despite their love of sports, are yet
fundamentally squires, i.e., essentially and historically approximating
to the peasants of their villages. The bearing of all this upon their
respective history will be obvious. Here again we have the origins of
the vivid contrast of the English or so-called naturalistic style of
landscape-gardening with the more formal French tradition. Yet in a very
true sense we see the former to be even more highly artificial than the
latter. [Page: 138] The English citizen who may even admit this way of
looking at the contrasted city plans of London and Paris may fail,
unless he has appreciated the principle here involved, to see why London
and Paris houses are so different--the one separate and self-contained,
with its door undefended and open upon the street, while the normal
Parisian house is a populous, high-piled tenement around a central
court, with high _porte cochère_ closed by massive oaken doors and
guarded by an always vigilant and often surly _concierge_.
A moment of historical reflection suffices to see that the former is the
architecture of a long-settled agricultural place, with its spreading
undefended villages, in which each household had its separate dwelling,
the other a persistence of the Continental fortified city crowded within
its walls.
But beyond this we must see the earlier historic, the simpler geographic
origins of the French courtyard house as a defensible farmyard, of which
the ample space was needed nightly for defence against wild beasts, if
not also wilder men, against whom the _concierge_ is not only the
antique porter but the primitive sentinel.
I may seem unduly to labour such points, yet do so advisedly, in order
to emphasise and make clearer the essential thesis of this portion of my
paper--that every scientific survey involves a geographic and historic
exploration of origins, but that of the still unwritten chapter, that
the far-reaching forelook, idealistic yet also critical, which is
needful to any true and enduring contribution to social service, is
prepared for by habitually imaging the course of evolution in the past.
Speaking personally, as one whose leisure and practical life have alike
been largely spent in the study and the preservation of ancient
buildings, I may say that this has not been solely, or even essentially,
from an antiquarian interest in the historic past, but still more on
behalf of a practical interest--that of the idealistic, yet economic,
utilitarian, because educational and evolutionary, transformation of our
old cities--old Edinburgh, old Dunfermline, and the like--from their
present sordid unhygienic failure; and therefore industrial and
commercial insufficiency, towards a future equalling if not transcending
the recorded greatness of the civic past.
It has, therefore, been to lay the broadest possible basis of
evolutionary science, of geographic and historic fact, for what would
otherwise be open to ridicule as a Utopian hope, that of Civics as
Applied Social Art, that I have insisted at such length above upon
Civics as Applied Social Science.
[Page: 139] PRESS COMMENTS
_The Times_ (July 20, 1904) in a leading article, said:
In the paper read on Monday at a meeting of the Sociological Society by
Professor GEDDES--an abstract of which we print--are contained ideas of
practical value to be recommended to the study of ambitious
municipalities. This is the age of cities, and all the world is
city-building. Almost everywhere is a flow from the country town-ward.
China and India may be still, in the main, lands of villages. But the
West, Russia perhaps excepted, is more and more peopled by dwellers in
cities. In a dim sort of way many persons understand that the time has
come when art and skill and foresight should control what so far has
been left to chance to work out; that there should be a more orderly
conception of civic action; that there is a real art of city-making, and
that it behoves this generation to master and practise it. Professor
Geddes truly said the land is already full of preparation as to this
matter; the beginnings of a concrete art of city-making are visible at
various points. But our city rulers are often among the blindest to
these considerations; and nowhere probably is to be seen a municipality
fully and consistently alive to its duties in this respect. London may
be left out of the question. Still a province rather than a city in the
strict sense, wanting what, in the view of the early master of political
science, was an essential of the true city, that it could "easily be
overseen," with a vast floating population, it will be some time before
it can be dealt with as an organic whole. But the rulers of such
communities as Manchester and Newcastle and York ought long ago to have
realised, much more than has been done, that they are not so much brick
and mortar, so much rateable area, so many thousands of people
fortuitously brought together. They have all a regional environment of
their own which determined their origin and growth. They have all a rich
past, the monuments of which, generally to be found in abundance by
careful, reverent inquirers, ought to be preserved; a past which ought
to be known more or less to all the dwellers therein, and the knowledge
of which will make the present more interesting. Even when old buildings
have disappeared, ancient roads, pathways, and streets can be traced;
place names keep alive much history; and the natural features reveal to
the practised eye what must have been the look and condition of a town
in past ages. Professor Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the
vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be. Even if the
comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never [Page: 140]
written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education
universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort
of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its
ancestral house or lands--will, even without much reading, have some
sort of notion of his predecessors and a certain pride in his membership
of an ancient community. If he has not the good fortune to be a De Vere,
a De Bohun, a Howard, Mowbray or Cavendish, he may perhaps be a citizen
of a town which flourished when some of these families were unknown.
Such pride, or, as the lecturer preferred to term it, such "growth of
civic consciousness and conscience, the awakening of citizenship towards
civic renascence," will be the best security for a worthy city of the
future....
Professor Geddes glanced at the opening civic future, "the remoter and
higher issues which a city's indefinitely long life and correspondingly
needed foresight and statesmanship involve," the possibilities which may
be easily realised if only there be true civic pride, foresight, and
unflagging pursuit of a reasonable ideal.... It remains to be seen what
our cities will become when for some generations the same spirit of
pride and reverence shown by old families as to their possessions has
presided over all civic changes and developments.... Ruskin somewhere
points out the mediaeval love of cities, unwholesome, dirty, and
forbidding though they were. He did not teach his generation that that
affection might with more reason attach to the modern city if its people
knew what it had been and steadily strove to make it better, if there
was in every large community patriotism and a polity.
DR. J.H. BRIDGES in _The Positivist Review_ (Sept., 1904), said: Under
the title, "Civics, as applied Sociology," Prof. Geddes read on July
18th a very interesting paper before the Sociological Society. The
importance of the subject will be contested by none. The method adopted
in handling it, being in many ways original, invites remark ...
What is wanted is first a survey of the facts to be dealt with--a
regional survey. This point of view has next to be correlated with
corresponding practical experience acquired by practical civic life, but
"aiming at a larger and more orderly conception of civic action."....
Students of Comte will not forget his well-known maxim, _Savoir pour
prévoir, afin de pourvoir_.
What is to be the area of survey? Prof. Geddes decides that the City may
be taken "as the integrate of study." Whether any modern towns, and, if
so, what, may be taken as integrates in the sense which would
undoubtedly apply to ancient Athens or to mediaeval Florence, may be
questioned; but it is too soon to interrupt our author.... Every one who
heard the lecturer must have been fascinated by his picture of a river
system which he takes for his unit of study; the high mountain tracts,
the pastoral hillsides, the hamlets and villages in the valleys, the
market town where the valleys meet, the convergence of the larger
valleys into a county town, finally, the great city where the river
meets the sea. The lecturer went on to advocate the systematic study of
some of the principal river-basins of the world for the purpose of
examining the laws which govern the grouping of cities. All would agree
that much instruction might be derived from such [Page: 141] a survey,
provided two dangers be avoided. One is the exaggeration of the
influence of the environment on the social organism, an error into which
the Le Play school have sometimes fallen; as when, for instance, it was
sought to explain Chinese civilisation by the rice-plant. The other
danger, which needs much care and thought to avoid, is the accumulation
of such a mass of irrelevant detail as renders (perhaps sometimes it is
intended to render) all generalisation impossible. Thinking men are at
last beginning to regard the accumulation of memoirs as one of the
principal obstacles to scientific progress. On the pretext of "more
evidence," conclusions are adjourned, not merely _sine die_, but _sine
spe diei_. Yet so long as man is man, he must, and will, have
conclusions; be they final or otherwise.
From the physiography of the city we pass to its history ...
In this part of his subject he has, as we all know, many precursors and
fellow-workers. The remarkable series, entitled "Historic Towns,"
instituted by Prof. Freeman, is known to most. The study of towns was
the life and soul of Mr. Green's historic labours. Eloquent and powerful
pictures of the great cities of the world fill the greater part of Mr.
Harrison's well-known volume, "The Meaning of History"; and the student
of universal history (a few of these, it may be hoped, are still left)
finds them very stimulating and helpful. The special note of Prof.
Geddes' method is that he does not limit himself to the greater cities,
but also, and perhaps by preference, deals with the smaller, and with
their physical environment; and, above all, that he attempts not merely
to observe closely and thoroughly, but to generalise as the result of
his observation. In biology, the study of any single organism, however
minute and accurate, could reveal no laws (i.e., no general facts) of
structure or function. As for instance, many forms of heart must be
examined before the laws governing blood-circulation could be revealed;
so here. Countless, indeed, are the forms of cities; even limiting our
field of observation to those that have grown up in the last century
they are numerous enough. Their differences and analogies would
doubtless repay analysis, always supposing that we are clear how far the
modern town, as contrasted with the mediaeval or Graeco-Roman city, can
usefully be treated as "an integrate." This raises large questions of
nation, of groups of nations, finally of Humanity, which cannot here be
touched.
Meantime, from the teacher's standpoint, there can be no question at
all, among those who look upon education as something more than a
commercial asset, as to the utility of looking on every old town, with
the neighbourhood around it, as a condensed record, here and there
perfect, elsewhere lamentably blotted, yet still a record, of the
history of our race. Historic memories survive in our villages far more
widely than is thought. The descendants of the man who found the body of
Rufus in the New Forest still live hard by. The builder whom the first
William set to build Corfe Castle was Stephen Mowlem; and the
Dorsetshire firm of Mowlem still pave London causeways. A poor woman in
a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the
ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk
peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody
Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three
hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised
in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern
England, is surrounded now by the same villages that Jocelyn tells us
of. The town named after St. Alban, with its memories of Cassivellaun
and Julius Caesar, of an old Roman city, of the Diocletian persecution,
of the great King Offa, founder of the abbey that was to become [Page:
142] at once a school of historical research, and our best epitome of
mediaeval architecture--all this, with the monument of the author of the
"Novum Organum" crowning the whole--sums up for us sixteen centuries of
history.
Professor Geddes for more than twenty years has adopted this method of
teaching sociology in the open air; "in the field," as geologists would
say....
This is much more than the study and the description of buildings and
places of historical interest. His aim is first to study the way in
which a city grows, always having due regard to its physical
environment; secondly, by comparing like with like, as a naturalist
compares the individuals of a species, or the species of a genus, to
throw light on the laws which govern civic development, and thus to help
forward and direct civic action.
All this is set forth with greater fulness in the Report which Professor
Geddes has been asked to write for the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. The
purpose of the Report (printed, but not yet published) was to suggest
the way in which the revenue of the Trust, amounting to £25,000, should
be spent for the benefit of this ancient and historic town. The scheme,
with its many pictures, real and ideal, of workshops, parks,
culture-institutes--physical, artistic, and historical--will deeply
interest even those who reject much of it as Utopian. But it is at least
a Utopia specially adapted to a given place and time, one in which every
feature of landscape and history is made the most of, one in which a
beginning can be made at once, leaving room for further developments as
occasion may serve. Moreover, it is penetrated through and through with
the Republican ideal of bringing the highest truth within the reach of
all.
Comte has pointed out, in the fifth chapter of his "General View of
Positivism," and elsewhere, that it is not enough to enunciate sound
principles of social renovation unless they can be rendered visible and
palpable. "The principal function of art," he says, "is to construct
types on the basis furnished by Science.... However perfectly the first
principles of social renovation may be elaborated by thinkers, they will
still not be sufficiently definite for the practical results.... But, at
the point where Philosophy must always leave a void, Art steps in, and
stimulates to practical action.... Hence, in the future, systematic
formation of Utopias will become habitual; on the distinct understanding
that as in every other branch of art, the ideal shall be kept in
subordination to the real."
Now, the Dunfermline Report is an admirable example of art thus allied
with science for social service. It is an ideal picture, strictly
adherent to local colour and conditions, of an ancient city prolonging
its vitality into the present and future by providing a very high form
of training for its citizens, a training not of intellect only, but of
the senses, of manual dexterity, of imagination, of Republican
sympathy--a training in which "laborious inacquaintance with dead
languages," infusing into the few touched by it a tincture of caste and
militarism, gives way to comprehensive study of the evolution of Man,
preparing the whole, and not a section merely, of the new generation for
social service.
Such a Utopia as this may be looked upon as fulfilling the true social
function of Art; standing midway between theory and practice; inspired
by thought, and stimulating action. Only the social artist has to look
to it that his thoughts be not merely true but adequate, lest he
degenerate into a mere decorator. How far will a series of "regional
surveys," like those of [Page: 143] Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree
in York, carry us! Not so far, I fear, as Professor Geddes seems to
hope. Cities in our modern life are organs inseparable from a larger
whole, the nation; and before the life of cities can be much changed, we
have to ask ourselves, What is the national life? What is its ethical
and religious standard? What is its practice as to the acquisition and
distribution of wealth? And, again, What is to be the intercourse of
nations? Is it to be war or peace?
Mr. Carnegie has given half a million for the benefit of a town of
30,000 inhabitants. Magnificent as the donation is, it is not too much;
not nearly enough, indeed, for the full realisation of Professor Geddes'
scheme. Still, wisely used, it might accomplish great results. What we
have recently sunk in the work of suppressing two free States in South
Africa would have made it possible to do for three hundred towns what
has been done for Dunfermline. Half of what we are now spending on our
army and navy would enable us to endow thirty more of such towns
annually.
Mr. ISRAEL ZANGWILL in _To-day_ (Aug. 10, 1904), said: The Sociological
Society is forging ahead at American speed; the professors jostle one
another, and Geddes treads on the heels of Galton. After "Eugenics," or
the Science of Good Births, comes "Civics," or the Science of Cities. In
the former Mr. Galton was developing an idea which was in the air, and
in Wells. In the latter Professor Geddes has struck out a more novel
line, and a still more novel nomenclature. Politography, Politogenics,
and Eu-Politogenics, likewise Hebraomorphic and Latinomorphic and
Eutopia--quite an opposite idea from Utopia--such are some of the
additions to the dictionary which the science of Civics carries in its
train. They are all excellent words--with the double-barrelled
exception--and still more excellent concepts. But I fancy the general
idea of them all could be conveyed to the man in the street under the
covering of "the human shell." This shell of ours is the city. It is the
protective crust we have built round ourselves. In a smaller sense our
house is our shell, but in a larger sense each house is only a lobe of
the complex and contorted whole. Geography shapes our shells from
without, and the spirit of our particular community shapes it from
within. History tells us how it has been shaped in the past, Art tells
us how it should be shaped in the future. Professor Geddes, in fact,
envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also
happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and
aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and
architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds
and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the
bee or the beaver. It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and
contorted with all the spirals of our history. And all these
manifestations of humanity may be studied as systematically as those of
the lower orders of creation, which have till recently monopolised the
privilege of pin and label. The old lady who admired the benevolence of
Providence in always placing rivers by the side of large towns was only
expressing in an exaggerated way the general failure to think of Civics
scientifically. The geographers, in whom may be found the bases of the
science, have always pointed out that the river system is the essential
unit for investigation. From source to sea goes the line of evolution.
And yet even the peasant hamlet at the source depends, as [Page: 144]
Professor Geddes reminds us, on the hinterland of pasture, forest, and
chase; and the hunter is the germ of the soldier and the aristocrat. The
whole region contributes to the ultimate city, as the whole river to the
ultimate sea. The Professor says, justly enough, that we should try to
recover the elemental or naturalist point of view, even for the greatest
cities. He sees London as "fundamentally an agglomeration of villages
with their surviving patches of common around a mediaeval seaport." This
is accurate vision; but when he discerns "even in the utmost
magnificence of Paris, say, its Place de l'Etoile, its spread of
boulevards, but the hunter's tryst by the fallen tree, with its
radiating forest rides, each literally straight," I cannot help
suspecting the over-ingenuity of a prolific intellect. The view of
London as a growth from embryos, and the view of Paris as the outcome of
atavistic instinct, belong to different planes of scientific thinking.
That Haussmann in reconstructing Paris was merely an unconscious hunter
and woodlander, building as automatically as a bee, is a fantastic
hypothesis; since cities, if they are to be built on a plan at all,
cannot avoid some unifying geometrical pattern; and there are not very
many possibilities.... In the department of Eu-Politogenics we shall be
confronted with the problem of consciously overriding what evolution has
unconsciously evolved, and building towards a fairer future. No doubt
much of our creation will be imitation, and Professor Geddes is
particularly suggestive in bidding us, at least, to be aware which of
the tangled strands of influence we desire to follow; but a measure of
artistic free-will remains. With the development of a corporate
conscience we should be able to turn out far more satisfactory shells
than many that have blundered into being. "Garden City" is only a
particular application of the science of Civics....
Eu-Politogenics concerns itself, however, with more than the mere
configuration of our human shell. Its colour and the music it holds are
considerations no less important. But they are too important to touch at
the fag-end of an article. Professor Geddes must, however, be
congratulated on a stimulating paper, and upon his discovery of Eutopia.
For Eutopia (unlike Utopia, which is really Ou-topia, or no place) is
merely your own place perfected. And the duty of working towards its
perfection lies directly upon _you_. "Civics--as applied sociology"
comes to show you the way.